Visions of a Sleepless World (2014-15)
Visions of a Sleepless World presents the result of a fictitious commission from a pharmaceutical company to produce an educational video about the neurocognitive effects of wakefulness-promoting drugs. Through a staging of the effects of sleep deprivation on the perception of time, memory and cognition, the video focuses on the organic limits of the body, investigating the notion of sleep as a manageable biological function, its relation to cognitive labour and the goal of non-stop productivity.
The idea for the piece is inspired by a film produced by the Belgian-born French writer Henri Michaux in 1963 on the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz. The black and white images presented in the small video monitor show the current location of the pharmaceutical company in Basel, born of the fusion of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz in 1996.
Visions of a Sleepless World, 2014-2015, two-channel video installation, variable dimensions. Performer: Andrea Saemann. Installation view, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
